Buckminster Fuller

R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) was an American designer, inventor and writer, born in Milton, Massachusetts. He was expelled from Harvard twice, had no architectural training and served in the U.S. Navy in the First World War. His projects aimed to provide shelter and transport with the least possible material and energy, which he described as doing more with less.

His Dymaxion House (1928) was a prefabricated metal house hung from a central mast; two later prototypes were built in Wichita, Kansas, in the 1940s. The Dymaxion car (1933) was a three-wheeled vehicle steered by its rear wheel, and the Dymaxion map projects the globe onto a flat arrangement of triangles to reduce distortion of the continents.

Fuller did not invent the geodesic dome, a sphere-like frame built from triangles; Walther Bauersfeld used the principle for a planetarium in Jena, Germany, in the 1920s. Fuller developed it into a system for light, quickly assembled enclosures and received a U.S. patent in 1954. His best-known dome is the U.S. Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal, designed with Shoji Sadao and now the Montreal Biosphère. He coined the word tensegrity for structures held together by continuous tension, and wrote Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1968). The carbon molecule buckminsterfullerene is named after him.